Every Credit Card a Tribe, Every Crypto Coin a Scaling Debate

Swartz calls payment groupings "Transactional communities," and every credit card or national currency represents one.

As Swartz writes in her book, "Venmo is not a wallet, it's a conversation."

"New Money" is a read that will force members of any crypto tribe to ask themselves: Who am I? What does using ETH or BTC or XLM or ATOM say about me and those with whom I affiliate?

Swartz's book is all about the complex story of how payments work, and what your chosen currency says about you.

As Swartz put it when we spoke, there was a camp of early Bitcoiners, those who counted themselves among the cypherpunks or an adjacent group, who knew that "Getting the money right will either be a matter of having the internet be just another overlay on the existing kind of tyranny, existing power, or it could really be an opportunity for changing society for the better."

In our conversation, Swartz and I revisited her book's discussion of Eugen Weber, the UCLA historian who wrote in 1976 of how the French franc was a key tool in turning "Peasants into Frenchmen" because using it gave them a transactional community, one where the fruits of their labor could be redeemed far from home.

Swartz describes how traveler's checks were a way for wealthy people to show that their money was good all over the world.

"Ethereum developers in Berlin look really different than venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, but they both look really different than people at home just trying to buy the latest asset," Swartz said.

As Swartz put it, payment rails are already eroding the state.

Swartz took this a step further: Travelers in another era might have called their consulate when they found themselves in trouble abroad; she feels sure her first call would be to her credit card company and most likely many others like her would say the same.